Look Beyond City's Fiscal Woes, Mayor Tells a Congregation

The budget news coming out of City Hall is grim, with city officials debating how much to raise property taxes and how deeply to cut core services. But yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged the parishioners of a Brooklyn church to take the long view.

''The best days for New York are yet to come,'' Mr. Bloomberg said at the Christian Cultural Center, a giant, predominantly black church in East New York, in a relatively rare appearance at a Sunday morning church service.

This week Mr. Bloomberg is set to announce hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts to help close a deficit that could be as large as $1 billion this year and $5 billion to $6 billion next year. A hiring freeze will reduce the size of the Police and Fire Departments as veterans retire; more than 100 sanitation workers who worked at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island are being laid off; and the mayor's aides are asking the City Council to raise property tax rates as much as 25 percent.

But the mayor sounded an upbeat note yesterday about the city's future. He spoke of the possibility of bringing the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York, as well as the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

Mr. Bloomberg described the city's fiscal woes as a ''short-term economic problem'' and said that balancing the budget would require ''some painful steps.'' But he spoke optimistically about the outlook for the city over the next few years.

''Don't lose sight that longer term, two or three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, this city has a better hand to play than any other city in the world,'' Mr. Bloomberg said to applause.

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And Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican who was a Democrat before he ran for office, said he would make personal pitches this week to bring the Democratic and Republican conventions to New York in 2004.

Mr. Bloomberg flew to Washington yesterday to dine with Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and to make the case for holding the party's convention in New York rather than in Boston, Miami or Detroit, the other contenders. Later in the week, Mr. Bloomberg plans to make a similar bid for the Republican convention.

At the church, Mr. Bloomberg spoke enthusiastically about the economic boom that he said the Olympics would bring. The Games, he said, would galvanize the city's tourism industry and create ''100,000 man-years of construction projects.''

''There are always naysayers who don't want to run any risks and say it would add to the traffic and that sort of thing,'' he said. ''I'll take some extra traffic for two weeks, thank you, to have all of the benefits that the Olympics would bring to us.''